Typical Meeting

A typical Toastmasters Meeting

1. Prepared Speeches presented by Club Members. Each speech has a set specific goals from our program, and each speaker has a personal evaluator who gives feedback on their speech. There are up to three prepared speeches are given at each meeting.
2. Table Topic Session practises impromptu speaking. The Table Topics Master has prepared topics, and some of the participants are asked to speak for one to two minutes.
3. During the Evaluation Session the speakers are given specific feedback on their speeches, highlighting what made the presentation strong & suggestions for improvement.
4. Word of the Day. One of the members presents a new or little known word for us to learn and records the number of times each person uses it during the meeting. This serves to increase everybody’s vocabulary. At the end of the meeting the Wordmaster reports on how many times the word of the day was used in the speeches, table topics and evaluations.

During the Evaluation Session

The evaluation session is where feedback is provided, not just to the speakers, but to all members. The evaluation session is headed by a General Evaluator, who calls on individual speech evaluators to give a 2- to 3-minute evaluation of an earlier presentation. After the evaluators have finished giving their evaluations, the General Evaluator calls for the helper reports:

- The Grammarian records grammatical errors and reports these at the end of the meeting.

- The Ah Counter keeps track of audible pauses such as "ah," "er," "um," "well," and "you know". These are also called 'embolalia', which are unnatural pauses or fillers in the flow of a speech.

- The Timer reports how much time each speaker, table topics responder, and evaluator took to give his or her presentation.

- The Wordmaster reports on how many times the word of the day was used.

 

Sample Agenda

17:40 Call to Order by President

Welcoming the Members and Guests

Business session

17:50 Toastmaster of the Evening

Introduction of the Theme of the Evening.

Introduction of the Word of the Evening.

17:55 Prepared Speeches Session

Toastmaster of the Evening introduces speakers, who deliver prepared speeches

Vote for Best Prepared Speaker

18:20 Table Topics Session

The Table Topics Master has chosen a number topics in advance. Table topics speakers are announced and they deliver their table topic speeches. (1½ - 2 minutes +/- 30 seconds each)

Vote for Best Table Topics Speaker

18:35 Evaluation Session

General Evaluator

Individual Evaluators (3 min. +/- 30 sec.)

Vote for Best Evaluator

18:45 Reports

Ah/Um Report

Timer’s Report

Grammarian’s Report

Word of the Evening Report

Vote Counter

18:55 Closing remarks by President

Comments from Guests

19:00 Adjournment

 

References: http://westconntoastmasters.org/webdoc5.htm